The Evolution of HDDs in the Near Future: Speaking with Seagate CTO, Mark Re
by Anton Shilov on July 6, 2016 2:00 PM ESTConclusion
While the evolution of consumer HDDs in the recent years was not fast, things are about to change. Use of SMR will help to increase capacities of hard drives in the coming quarters and then TDMR will help to drive capacities again in the coming years. One thing that should be clear at this point is that the evolution of HDDs in the future will be slightly different from their development in the past. The reason for that is segmentation of the HDD market and the need for optimized configurations based on the application. Makers of hard drives tend to tailor their models for particular applications and one size does not fit all even in a segment of the market.
For example, archive, nearline, NAS, DAS and secondary HDDs for desktop PCs benefit from high capacities. However, performance barely matters for archive or DAS hard drives, whereas nearline and NAS have to be offer both storage space and relatively high performance. As a result, some HDDs just offer vast capacities and performance with the help of PMR, helium and 7200 rpm motors, whereas other rely on SMR and come with a lower spindle speed.
Things will not get any less complicated in the coming years because the technology to build HDDs that satisfy demands of end-users and cost reasonable amounts of money is not easy. As a result, some technologies, or a combination of technologies, will not be used to build all types of HDDs. Some things will remain mostly in the data center for Seagate (such as helium), other will be strictly aimed at the consumer (hybrid drives).
Moreover, Seagate and its rivals understand that HDDs cannot compete against SSDs when it comes to performance, especially random read/write performance. Therefore, while hard drives will get faster in the coming years, do not expect manufacturers to make performance their primary concern. At least, not when it comes to competition against SSDs. Density and power are primary concerns with a base level of performance.
Seagate's roadmap includes SMR, TDMR, HAMR as well as multiple other technologies. The company has been developing a set of technologies that should enable capacity, performance, reliability, and endurance of future HDDs featuring the aforementioned recording methods. What the company cannot be sure about is exact demand from various market segments, for example, demand for data center HDDs does not seem to be growing rapidly, but yet this is a segment that Seagate pins a lot of hopes on. Client storage is changing in general and while it is possible to predict what future client HDDs should offer, demand for client hard drives are still up for debate.
The situation with some of the upcoming technologies is pretty clear and exact products will be developed based on market performance, keeping in mind financial viability. Recently Seagate announced plans to adjust its manufacturing capacities in a bid to maintain financial stability, which will inevitably have an impact on its future products.
We would like to thank Mark Re for his time in discussing Seagate's future.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Seagate: Hard Disk Drives Set to Stay Relevant for 20 Years
Hard Disk Drives with HAMR Technology Set to Arrive in 2018
Market Views: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low
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Ushio01 - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
I wonder how much of this will ever reach market? as SSD's take over ever more of the storage market the remaining HDD manufacturers will be required to spend ever more on R&D while dealing with shrinking revenue.DanNeely - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
The consumer HDD market is slowly imploding, but while it's roughly half of all drives sold that's not where the money is. The Enterprise HDD market is doing better. Sales are down a bit; but while Seagate/WD/Toshiba don't break the two segments of enterprise drives out, it's probably from SSDs chewing into 10/15k drives in servers not the high capacity 3.5" drives used for bulk storage. Seagates comments about the next gen of 15k drives potentially being the last tends to back this up, since they're talking about multiple generations of other drive types.Bulk data storage will stay with spinning rust until the price per GB crosses over in SSDs favor. Estimates I've seen on that a year or so ago were looking at 2025; but there's a fair amount of speculation there since the results of a half dozen generations of tech in each platform are somewhat speculative.
Anato - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
That patent [1] is clear example how current patent system is out of control and not useful to society at large. Short recap, patents original idea was to give temporal monopoly to inventor who disclosed his invention. There was no right to own anything you invented, but it was seen that disclosing the invention would ultimately benefit society who, after temporal monopoly, could use the invention.Now opposite is true, there is nothing useful disclosed in Seagates patent! But we grand Seagate sole ownership to use Gold with Cu, Rh, Ru, ... or Mo in concentrations of 0.5-30% in HAMR NFT. How does this benefit us?
Of course Seagate can't stop WD to use same alloys as WD have similar patents to sue back, but they both can stifle smaller competitors. I don't think there will be any more competitors in HDD space, but same applies to other fields and their patents.
[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US8427925
[Disclosure, I didn't read full patent application, did cursory review and didn't find anything of value]
Zak - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
I was wondering why HDs never broke the 7500rpm and 15000rpm barriers.DanNeely - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
For consumer devices: noise. 10/15k HDDs are obnoxiously loud like an >40x CD or >16x DVD drive; except that they're spinning constantly not just for the few minutes it takes to read/write them. On the enterprise side, I'd guess implementation difficulty; probably due to vibrations was the limiting factor. If not mechanical strength of the platters themselves was probably the issue. Top end centrifuges can go to at least 70k RPM; but can be built much more heavily than a thin platter can.metayoshi - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
Not just noise, but heat. In a constrained system like a laptop or desktop, the spindle and vibrations cause a ton of heat to be generated. Just look at WD's last consumer 10k drive, the 1 TB Velociraptor. It's a 2.5" drive that comes with its own heatsink for 3.5" bays. You definitely can't put that in a laptop, and it hits a market in the desktop space which has pretty much been taken over by SSDs.piasabird - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
Still using hard drives. No reason to switch when hard drives are so cheap. When I watch TV on the Internet, It still works so no reason to change.pavag - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
Kurzweil curse.Nobody accounts the relative speed of price reduction. SSD will get cheaper per gigabyte than SSD before 2020.
We will never see HDMR HDD. And there is a chance we will not even get HAMR.
And article speculating about the date when SSD will beat HDD for price per gigabyte would be interesting.
serendip - Friday, July 8, 2016 - link
I'm not sure about this. On my laptop, I've got a 120 GB SSD I got ages ago along with a recent 2 TB drive. Both cost about the same when new. I think HDDs will continue to get bigger and cheaper faster than SSDs, at least until some new process tech allows for very high flash densities and low production cost.The main issue is price. There are still lots of users (like me) who can't afford huge multi-TB SSDs to hold everything, so they have to make do with a boot SSD and a storage HDD.
jabber - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
So you didn't bother to ask why Seagate's HDD reliability has nosedived since the floods a few years back?